There’s been a very courteous, very passive-aggressive skirmish unfolding over social media recently about which former Condé Nast veteran was the true inspiration for Emily Blunt’s scene-stealing first assistant in The Devil Wears Prada — Emily Charlton — who, of course, returns in the sequel.
In one corner, there’s celebrity stylist Leslie Fremar, who served as Anna Wintour’s real first assistant at Vogue back in 1999, the same year Lauren Weisberger, author of the best-seller on which the first movie was based, served as Wintour’s second assistant. “It was really based off a lot of things that, you know, I lived, she lived,” Fremar said recently on Vogue’s podcast The Run-Through, noting that, like the Emily in the movie, she was “not very nice” to Weisberger back when they worked together.
But not so fast, Leslie. Because the internet is also bristling with speculation that Vogue’s longtime entertainment director-turned-casting director Jill Demling is actually Emily’s true inspiration. The evidence, such as it is, focuses on the fact that Demling was Wintour’s first assistant before Fremar — in fact, she was the one who hired Fremar to replace her — and was known to be even less nice to the other assistants. “I was kind of strict in the way I ran [Wintour’s] office,” Demling recently told The Daily Mail. “Leslie even said she was intimidated to take my job because of how I ran the office.”
Demling, though, hasn’t overtly claimed the Emily mantle. In fact, she’s been coyly distancing herself from the speculation, even as she’s been riding the wave of publicity it’s afforded her. On her podcast, Going Rogue — which not-at-all-coincidentally dropped a roundtable of former Vogue assistants, including Fremar, just as Prada 2 was arriving in theaters — she acknowledged that Fremar was the “real Emily.” She’s also waved away the claims on social media, posting on Instagram, “No quotes about ‘I’m the real Emily’ — because I never actually said that.”
Meanwhile, some other former Condé Nasties have been taking bows, as well. Longtime Vogue editor William Norwich has been dining out for years on rumors that he’s the real Nigel Kipling. “When I’m introduced to people now, someone will say, ‘This is Billy — he’s the guy in The Devil Wears Prada. He’s the real Stanley Tucci,’” he once told an interviewer. “There are certainly similarities. I was a very caring, avuncular person at Vogue. It was a huge boon to my sex life.” But then veteran fashion editor Paul Cavaco is also frequently pegged as Nigel’s inspiration — although Cavaco has publicly disavowed any such notions, saying he believes the character is based on “a combo of Billy Norwich and Vogue writer Hamish Bowles.”
As for Meryl Streep’s character, the actress has on several occasions attempted to distance Miranda from Wintour, claiming she based Miranda more on directors she’s worked with — but nobody believes that. Probably not even Anna Wintour.
